Mission: Impossible - Fallout

The IMF franchise will become Tom Cruise's legacy which is sad because he's better than a stuntman supremo. The challenge that is Impossible masks scripts that blow holes through comprehension, but - hold the phone! - action pictures are not renowned for storytelling. They are remembered for their stunts and their macho mayhem and (occasionally) their style.

Fallout has a plot that implodes in your brain, destroying the ability to function in any logical way. Open your eyes. Admire the death defying artistry. Hooked on danger you may suffer a cardiac arrest. Be careful. Mainlining on Cruise Control comes with a health warning.

The film opens with a weird dream. Forget that. It's not important. The arrival of a CIA dude (Alec Baldwin) is the kick off point. He says there's a group of bad cats who want to take over the world by destroying it with nuclear weapons. You think you know who he's talking about, but it's not religious, it's evil, and their prince of darkness is a made-to-measure mad scientist (Sean Harris), with a hedgerow haircut and a ginger beard. The IMF team (Cruise, Ving Rhames, Simon Pegg) has to recover the atomic bomblets before they explode and wipe out nice people.

You have fought the good fight since Dick Barton, Special Agent. The modern version would be James Bond Plus Plus Plus, or these guys. In addition to the three musketeers there are cast implants, such as Henry Cavill, playing tough and more convincing than his wood-on-wood performances in Man Of Steel and The Man From U.N.C.L.E, as a professional hitman assigned to the project. Rebecca Ferguson is good with a gun, too, but despite references to previous encounters of a sexual nature it is difficult to know whose side she's on.

This fashion for the double cross is a bit like trying to make sense of politics when the top guys are lying and there's fake news flying everywhere. Reality suffers when trust is shredded. Who do you believe?

Despite a dose of the Jason Bournes, without their trademark handhelds and fast cuts, Fallout does what it's supposed to do extremely well. You haven't seen a punch up in a gent's lav like this one and if you think car chases, or, in this case, a motorbike chase through Paris, is old hat the choreography, with Cruise in the saddle, will blow you away. Later, in copters and on a 1000 ft cliff face in Kashmir, the stakes are getting crazy. If the techno-wiz-bods are filling in with CGI it's what they call in the trade "an invisible mend". You can't see the join.

One question blows in the wind. Do you care?

Not enough.